Associated Baptist Press - 11/21/2008

Associated Baptist Press
November 21, 2008 · (08-114)

David Wilkinson, Executive Director
Robert Marus, Acting Managing Editor/Washington Bureau Chief
Bob Allen, Senior Writer

In this issue
Religious leaders protest violence against Christians in India (310 words)
Alleged church-offering thief helps nab himself with visitor card (390 words)
Opinion: Discipline as a form of care (850 words)

---

Religious leaders protest violence against Christians in India
By Bob Allen

WASHINGTON (ABP) -- Two Baptists were among 24 prominent Christian leaders in the United States who recently signed an open letter to President Bush calling for action against anti-Christian violence in India.

Daniel Vestal of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and William Shaw of the National Baptist Convention USA, Inc., joined other religious leaders from Catholic, mainline Protestant, evangelical, Pentecostal and African-American church bodies asking Bush to urge India's prime minister to enforce religious freedom guarantees in India's Constitution.

Recently Bush signed an arms-control and trade accord with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, saying it indicated that "nations that follow the path to democracy and responsible behavior will find a friend in the United States."

In light of that, the leaders urged the president to hold India accountable for stopping violence carried out by extremist Hindu mobs that started in Orissa and has spread to six other states. Reports indicate that more than 60 people have been killed in recent weeks and 50,000 people have fled their homes, with many still in hiding.

The Nov. 7 letter said the attacks, targeting mainly poor Christians, amount to "religious cleansing" of Christians and other minorities.

The letter called on the president to "insist, in the strongest terms, that these reprehensible groups and the assenting local government agencies be brought into conformity with India's rule of law."

"Only if India agrees and acts with goodwill toward all its citizens will it continue to be viewed as a responsible global partner worthy of a place on the world stage with other democratic nations," the letter concluded.

In October Neville Callam, general secretary of the Baptist World Alliance, wrote a letter to Singh about "the grim situation facing Christians in Orissa. " It urged the Indian leader "to intervene, in the best traditions of the Indian sub-continent, to bring relief to the people suffering in Orissa."

Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.

---

Alleged church-offering thief helps nab himself with visitor card
By Bob Allen

LAKELAND, Fla. (ABP) -- In the annals of petty crime, it may not be the stupidest theft ever. But it's probably close.

Sheriff's deputies in Lakeland, Fla., tracked down a man charged with stealing the Nov. 16 offering from a Southern Baptist church with help from a visitor card he had filled out the previous Sunday. He had given the church his first name and his mother's address.

And the church treasurer from whom he allegedly grabbed the money just happens to be the county sherriff's stepmother.

Harold Williams, 28, was arrested Nov. 17 on charges of robbery by snatching, a felony punishable by up to three years in prison, and disrupting a religious assembly, a misdemeanor.

Williams is accused of grabbing a portion of the offerings collected from about 70 worshippers at Crystal Lake Baptist Church from the church treasurer, then running away.

Ushers who had just collected the offering told a local television station they recognized the young man who followed them out of the sanctuary and grabbed the money. They recalled he had been a visitor the previous Sunday.

Initial news reports said the suspect had filled out a visitor card the Sunday before with the name Harold, along with a phone number and address that did not check out with detectives.

Updated reports after the arrest, however, said police went to the address on the card, and the woman who lived there told them she had a son named Harold. Deputies arrested Williams after spotting him walking on a street near the church.

Detectives reportedly found two checks -- for $120 and $40 -- made out to the church and discarded offering envelopes in bushes at a nearby elementary school. It was initially estimated that the thief took about $100. Williams reportedly told deputies he took $22 and threw everything else that was with the money on the ground.

The church member holding the money when Williams allegedly grabbed it was Shirley Judd, stepmother to Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd. Six patrol units responded within minutes of the 911 call, followed by K-9 units and a helicopter.

A sheriff's department spokesperson told the Lakeland Ledger it wasn't unusual for that many units to respond, because when a suspect flees on foot there is always a possibility he is still in the area, and police respond accordingly.

Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.

---

Opinion: Discipline as a form of care
By Beth Newman

(ABP) -- Not too long ago, someone shared with me an instance of attempted church discipline. A pastor, on his own initiative, had approached a church member who had left her family to pursue a relationship with her "soulmate." The pastor was informed in no uncertain terms that this private matter was no business of his or of the church.

I must admit to admiring the pastor's sense of his duty, but the story left me wondering whether church discipline has any place within the lives of the people called Baptists. It seems to fly in the face of much that we hold dear, such as the freedom of the individual conscience, not to mention the "priesthood of all believers."

More generally, most of us are instinctively hesitant to stand in judgment over one another. At least one Bible verse that is quoted by Christian and non-believer alike is "Judge not, that you be not judged," (Matt. 7:1). Furthermore, if "church discipline" conjures any sort of picture for a lot of us, it would be that of Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, the scarlet letter "A" emblazoned across her bosom, shunned by all around her.

From this perspective, church discipline seems to go hand-in-hand with self-righteousness. "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?" (Matt. 7:2)

Many of our Baptist ancestors, however, appeared to have no such qualms. Rather, they saw church discipline as ultimately redemptive. A Summary of Church Discipline, adopted in 1773 by the Charleston (S.C.) Baptist Association (later published in Wilmington, N.C. and Richmond, Va.), provides a particularly vivid example.

A pertinent section of the summary is titled, "Of Church Censures," and discusses three levels of church discipline: rebuke, suspension and excommunication. The rebuke is for a lesser offense: for example, when someone "exposes to others the infirmities of a brother." An example of an action calling for suspension would be when a congregant is a busy "tattler and backbiter," or "when he broaches unsound, heretical principles." And excommunication (done in phases) is reserved for "notorious and atrocious crimes."

The point of excommunication is restoration. All censures "must be administered in love and tenderness." If an offender, "even of the highest rank," gives clear evidence of evangelical repentance, then he or she should "by no means be excommunicated."

Such discipline no doubt sounds harsh to us, but this is due to the contemporary tendency to see discipline primarily as negative. Such a perspective blinds us to the fact that we are being disciplined every day of our lives. My children, for example -- especially when they watch TV -- are being trained to want the latest video games or to desire to look like the actresses on their favorite shows. This is not only true of children. Adults are trained to avoid "wasting time," or to see politics as essentially what the government does.

The question is not whether we are being disciplined, but how.

For this reason, I find it fascinating that A Summary of Church Discipline begins with the discipline of worship. The authors make the obvious (but, today, often-forgotten) claim that we do not gather ourselves. Rather, "Christ gathers to himself a people from among all nations." The church is not a voluntary organization, but a called people.

Further, the authors state a gospel church is "not national, but congregational." What separates church discipline from state discipline is, first of all, the determination to worship Christ in all things. The failure to separate church from state stems from idolatry. This is why A Summary can claim that the church is wider than the state, since worship joins the congregation with "the catholic or universal church, [which] considered collectively, forms one complete and glorious body...."

According to A Summary, the discipline of worship begins before members gather, with fasting (we are not told for how long). Worship proper opens with prayer, followed by a sermon, a time of testimony and inquiry (into the work of grace in the congregants' lives, their "soundness of doctrine," the "goodness of their lives"). The worshipers then subscribe to a written covenant "consistent to the Word of God." The service culminates with participation in the Lord's Supper.

James Leo Garrett Jr., in his introduction to a modern reprint of this treatise, relates the desire for a committed, disciplined Baptist church to other renewal movements within the church universal: Roman Catholic monastic communities, and (more recently) the Iona Community in the United Kingdom, the Taizé Community in France and the Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C.

Discipline presupposes a community that is both caring and committed. One might, for example, consider a so-called "intervention" where it is an act of love to confront someone with the consequences of his behavior. This is done not merely to "save" the individual from himself, but to ensure the well-being of the family. The absence of discipline does not speak of a broad-mindedness or generosity of the spirit. It is about an abandonment of responsibility and the failure of love.

-- Beth Newman is professor of theology and ethics at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond.